Action Concepts

An action is a task or notification that is automatically performed by TA in response to a job event trigger that occurs for a specific job or job group or system event trigger. Actions are customized tasks and messages linked to a job or system event through the Job Event Definition and System Events dialogs. The job or system event is then associated with a job or job group. For example, an action to send email to the owner of a job that failed can be tied to a Job Completed Abnormally job event trigger. Another action that sends an alert message to the console can also be linked to the same job event so that two actions occur simultaneously when the job fails.

Note: When multiple actions are defined for a single event, the actions are completed as the conditions to satisfy the event trigger are fulfilled.

Action Types

From the Actions pane, you can view the actions that belong to you or your workgroups.

The types of actions you can choose from are:

  • Email – Use an email message action to notify users via email that an event occurred.

  • Log – Use a log message action to post a message to the TA and system logs to record that a specified condition occurred. Each TA log message has a unique numerical identifier. You can view TA logs from the Logs pane and view Windows event logs using the Windows Event Viewer.

  • Job – Use a new job action to add special recovery, pager activation or ad hoc jobs to the production schedule when a job event or system event occurs. For example, you can add a recovery job into the schedule if the underlying job fails.

  • Alert – Use an alert action to send an alert message to the Alerts pane of the TA client. These alerts generated by the action can be assigned varying levels of severity. Once these alert messages are sent to the TA client, the Alerts status light turns yellow to notify a user that a condition in the system has generated an alert. The alert must be acknowledged and eventually closed, forcing the TA operator to respond to them. The Alerts pane is discussed in more detail later in this chapter at Alerts Interface.

  • SNMP – Use an SNMP message action to send an SNMP message (trap) to an SNMP manager such as Hewlett Packard’s OpenView application.

  • HP OV Message – Use a HP OpenView message action to send a message to HP OpenView Operations software application.

  • Variable – Use a variable action to change a user-defined variable. This action will not affect system, job or job event variables.

Variables

TA lets you use system, job, job event and user-defined variables in action messages, making them applicable to many jobs. For instance, you could create an action called Job Stopped Email Notification, with variables in the message text that will be replaced at runtime with the job name and runtime. When you create a job and want to be notified if it stops during execution, you can associate the action with the job from the Job Event Definition dialog. If the job stops during execution, you receive an email referring to the job that triggered the event. You could even include in the message a variable representing the exit code at the time of completion.